Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Levitt's Progress: The Rise of the Suburban-Industrial Complex
- 2 From the Solar House to the All-Electric Home: The Postwar Debates over Heating and Cooling
- 3 Septic-Tank Suburbia: The Problem of Waste Disposal at the Metropolitan Fringe
- 4 Open Space: The First Protests against the Bulldozed Landscape
- 5 Where Not to Build: The Campaigns to Protect Wetlands, Hillsides, and Floodplains
- 6 Water, Soil, and Wildlife: The Federal Critiques of Tract-House Development
- 7 Toward a Land Ethic: The Quiet Revolution in Land-Use Regulation
- Conclusion
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
- Plate section
3 - Septic-Tank Suburbia: The Problem of Waste Disposal at the Metropolitan Fringe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Levitt's Progress: The Rise of the Suburban-Industrial Complex
- 2 From the Solar House to the All-Electric Home: The Postwar Debates over Heating and Cooling
- 3 Septic-Tank Suburbia: The Problem of Waste Disposal at the Metropolitan Fringe
- 4 Open Space: The First Protests against the Bulldozed Landscape
- 5 Where Not to Build: The Campaigns to Protect Wetlands, Hillsides, and Floodplains
- 6 Water, Soil, and Wildlife: The Federal Critiques of Tract-House Development
- 7 Toward a Land Ethic: The Quiet Revolution in Land-Use Regulation
- Conclusion
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
About 20 years ago, the best-selling chronicler of American middle-class culture, Erma Bombeck, offered a succinct interpretation of the rise of suburbia:
The suburbs were discovered quite by accident one day in the early 1940s by a Welcome-Wagon lady who was lost. As she stood in a mushy marshland, her sturdy Red Cross shoes sinking into the mire, she looked down, and exclaimed, “It's a septic tank. I've discovered the suburbs!”
News of the discovery of a septic tank spread and within weeks thirty million city dwellers readied their station wagons and began the long journey to the edge of town in search of a bath and a half and a tree.
In that passage from The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank, Bombeck humorously noticed what more scholarly observers have overlooked: Like the automobile and the highway, the septic tank was a key element in the suburbanization of the United States. With backyard systems for waste disposal, houses did not need to be near municipal sewer lines, so the area available for suburban development expanded tremendously.
Because the census bureau did not begin to count the nation's septic tanks until 1960, historians have no sure way to gauge the increase in numbers after World War II. But the available evidence makes clear that the increase was phenomenal. In 1945, according to one government estimate, only about 4.5 million homes had septic tanks.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Bulldozer in the CountrysideSuburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, pp. 87 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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